Losing Track: An Insider's Story of Britain's Railway Transformation from British Rail to Present Day

By John Nelson

How Britain’s railways are organised is the book’s running theme. It is an account that will interest anyone wanting to understand how things could be run better. Written by John Nelson who was centrally involved in all of the controversial changes that took place over the last half century, it draws on his own public and private sector experience to provide evidence based opinion of what needs to be done now.

Along the way he describes what the post Beeching railway was like to work in; the internal battles that raged during the commercialisation of BR in the 1980s; the ideological privatisation process of the 1990s and how it nearly came unstuck; how the first franchises were awarded and the motivations of their owners; how some were saved from financial collapse; and how first Railtrack and then franchising ran into the sand. He describes how all attempts to put right the mistakes made when trains and infrastructure were separated have failed. In describing key events he explains the roles of many of the senior managers, civil servants and politicians who were centrally involved.

This book shows that the country’s railway was only organised effectively for a brief period during the early 1990s. Politically-motivated reforms then and since have created an industry that today is neither truly privatised nor fit for purpose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Oct 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789557442

John Nelson

John A. Nelson is considered a master craftsman by scroll saw enthusiasts and is a frequent contributor to Scroll Saw Woodworking & Crafts magazine. He is the author of 10 books about scroll sawing, including The Complete Guide to Making Wooden Clocks, 50 Easy Weekend Scroll Saw Projects, Making Wooden Baskets on Your Scroll Saw, and Inspirational Scroll Saw Projects. John has spent thousands of hours at the scroll saw, authored dozens of patterns, and built some of the most beautiful examples of scrollwork to be found.

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Trewin.

CHAPTER ONE

1968-81: A good grounding: Working on the front Line

I joined British Rail as a graduate management trainee in 1968, a year in which to many the railways appeared to be in terminal decline. At 9%, the passenger railway’s market share was about half the level it had been only 16 years earlier. The network had been reduced by roundly a third over the preceding decade and in the coming years there would be talk of further cutbacks and, in one extreme case, of turning the main lines into roads. These were the days of carefree motoring. Motorways were in their infancy with massive expansion imminent and by the 1980s railways were not being seen as an asset that could fulfil an expanding societal and environmental role but as a drain on national resources. As a nationalised industry BR was prey to the Government’s regulation of the economy. Funding could rise when there was a perceived need to stimulate economic growth but at other times, and increasingly from 1970 to the mid- 90s, cutting public spending was a constant theme of Government policy.

Despite the prevailing climate, railways continued to bump along at more or less the same level of market share for a number of years. Only in 1982, a year when BR suffered a series of industrial disputes, did it dip lower. Notwithstanding the musings of the more extreme economists and the politicians’ tendency to view them as a problem rather than a potential solution, railways stubbornly maintained their position in the transport firmament – and to an important extent, the affection of the public.

Not that there was unanimity about the nature of the problem. In contrast to a greater consensus that was to emerge in the late 1990s there were distinctly different political attitudes displayed by the main parties in the period that preceded it. Labour, the Party mostly in Government during the 1960s and 70s, attempted to define the railways in a social and wider economic context. Barbara Castle’s 1968 Transport Act encapsulated values which encouraged me as an undergraduate looking for a job with a social purpose to apply to join BR’s Management Training Scheme. The establishment of Passenger Transport Authorities in the major conurbations was a progressive move that can be seen to have been immensely successful for integrated public transport in general and railways in particular. They continue to be so.

In the 1970s Labour Governments put in place valuable funding structures around the railways, notably one that came to be known by the acronym PSO. The Public Service Obligation was a grant; the first real attempt to recognise the social role of railways where they remained unprofitable in simple financial terms. By implication the rest of the railway was now seen as more ‘commercial’, in competition with other modes of transport. However, the creation of a financially ring-fenced ‘social railway’ meant that strict financial disciplines could be applied there too. There began a process that was to accelerate in subsequent years; of considering the various constituent parts of the railway in terms of their direct costs and revenues.

None of this was remotely obvious to me on the morning of 16th September 1968 when I travelled down the Great Western Main Line to Bristol to meet my new employers for the first time. On a misty autumn day the platform signs on arrival at the first station en route advertised my emergence into the time warp that was Swindon. Surely here was a place that in the late 1960s encapsulated the declining railway more than anywhere else; one that had changed little in physical form from the railway Brunel himself had created yet one that was now under threat. The vista of the dismal station buildings was followed by my first view of the vast GWR locomotive works on the Bristol side of the town offering images of a railway just as it had been over a century ago. As my train edged westwards slowly and with reluctance it was soon greeted by another major physical manifestation from the age of Brunel. As we entered the Box Tunnel I recalled that my great grandfather had started work on this railway in the 1880s and that his great grandfather had moved from Scotland to apply his skills as a stone mason in the construction of this feat of Victorian engineering. I reflected on the railway’s incongruity in the otherwise modernising era of the 1960s. Yet here too was a reminder of its history, its traditions; even of its permanence.

The range and extent of railway activities remained vast and all-embracing and the two year management training programme that I entered covered all the bases. Apart from the absence of steam locomotives, which had finally been withdrawn the year before, this was a railway my forefathers would have recognised. From parcels and freight depots with their weighbridges, trolleys and tow trucks, to marshalling yards and isolated Devonian milk sidings, this railway hadn’t really changed. Even the Scillonian ferry remained under the wing of what one of my later colleagues would refer to as the mother railway. The captain of that vessel would sometimes break his journey at my lodgings in Exeter, half way between London and his home station of Penzance.

Neither had this nationalised railway forgotten its private sector company roots and traditions. The Area Manager’s organisation at Exeter to which I was attached covered the most splendid part of South Devon and had recently been remapped to combine the Great Western Main Line and part of the old Southern Railway routes from Waterloo to Devon and Cornwall. Although this epitomised the geographical, functional approach to BR’s operations in those days, there remained intense rivalry amongst those who had worked for the two private companies. When the Southern part was ‘acquired’ by the Western Region many files and records at Exeter Central were burned to prevent them falling into the wrong hands. At the same time, a visible reminder of the dramatic technical changes taking place existed in the form of a graveyard of recently retired steam locomotives at Exmouth Junction, a stark contrast to the usually double headed main line trains hauled by the spanking new Hymek diesel hydraulic locomotives that operated between Paddington and the West of England. Western Zulu was a particular favourite of mine.

Historically significant traffic flows acted as a reminder of the important place that the railway continued to play. The problem was that they were declining. Before the days of package holidays to the Costas, overnight trains would arrive from towns and cities in the North and Midlands with passengers seated in standard coaches en route to resorts in Devon and Cornwall. These would start arriving at Exeter during the small hours of the morning and would be interspersed with what were known as brute trains 1 conveying parcels from mail order companies in Bradford and Sunderland destined for homes in the small towns and villages of south Devon.

Even in the wake of Beeching, several country branch lines remained active and isolated groups of staff could be found at signal boxes and milk sidings dotted about the Devon countryside. In my first week I acted as ‘shotgun’ accompanying a manager distributing pay packets in a way that was reminiscent of an ancient barter system as he traded eggs, honey and chickens, and delivered them in turn to other members of staff elsewhere on the round. The signalmen at Exeter Riverside trapped otters and the skins were hung up on redundant parts of the lever frame to dry out. Practically all the railway staff had other occupations; bed and breakfast accommodation or smallholdings in the main. They were friendly, welcoming people and I fell in love with the railway family straight away.

It was quickly apparent that the underlying management preoccupation was the financial pressure created by declining industries on which the railway had relied; and by the decreasing dependence folk had on public transport. There was heavy emphasis on the need to reduce costs which was often seen simplistically as the need to rationalise the infrastructure. This was exemplified by two situations I encountered, the first being a proposal to withdraw passenger services between Exeter and Okehampton because revenues did not cover the costs of operation. The calculations, based on Government approved costing systems, allocated all costs to this service despite the fact that the line remained open for the supply of railway ballast from Meldon Quarry which lay beyond Okehampton in the lee of Dartmoor. Decades later services were restored when more sensible costing rules were applied.

Secondly, I was charged with evaluating the feasibility of closing the signal box at Exeter Riverside Yard, it being thought that declining freight traffic could be handled just as easily by shunting staff operating a simplified form of signalling controlled by point levers and a ground frame. I was able to demonstrate feasibility and furthermore that the layout could be simplified to facilitate operations and reduce infrastructure costs. Those who suggest that the railways then were overburdened by tradition and tolerated inefficiency are not entirely right. Certainly they had to deal with the legacy of traditional traffic but it is wide of the mark to assert that inefficiency was always tolerated. It is forgotten that the railway was by law a ‘common carrier’. It could not pick and choose from the profitable and loss making traffics. It was Barbara Castle who put a stop to this.

Nevertheless BR’s acceptance of rules for negotiating productivity changes meant they could not always be implemented without opposition from the trade unions. BR was not unique in this respect and in fact had inherited many of these traditions from the former private railway companies. Neither were its practices much different from other large industries, whether nationalised or privately owned. ‘Restrictive practices’ were endemic in British industry at this time and in 1969 I had an early taste of what they meant.

The same 1968 Transport Act that had attracted me to the industry separated parts of BR’s goods traffic and placed substantial elements in the ownership of a new, largely road based, National Freight Corporation in acknowledgement of the changing profile of freight logistics. The NFC had a parcels or ‘sundries’ division called National Carriers (NCL) which was given control of the road vehicles that collected and delivered all parcels – including those that continued to be transported by BR passenger train. It was suspected that NCL was prioritising its parcels in preference to BR's and I was remitted to find out. My project involved visiting West of England depots to observe the way traffic was handled following the arrival of the respective BR and NCL parcels trains. The suspicions proved to be right. At depot after depot the procedure was the same. Road delivery vehicles were loaded up with both traffics but in such a way that NCL's got priority. In rural areas this meant that BR parcels arriving in the early hours that could have been delivered from about 9am the same day (effectively an overnight delivery from London, for example) were left for up to three days until the next delivery to that area. My report formed the basis of a new contract between BR and NCL in which a fairer arrangement was agreed but the situation exemplified the drag effect that restrictive operating practices had on the quality of service experienced by the customer, not to mention efficient operation of the service. This practice was inherent in the split company structure but there were also shades of restrictive labour practices. Many jobs were tied up in this inefficient methodology and the unions had a strong grip on certain railway departments, particularly at the larger locations. I was specifically instructed not to observe operations at the Western Region's two most militant depots – Paddington and Bristol – for fear that the unions would think I was undertaking a time and motion efficiency study and call strike action.

Other developments were more positive and in retrospect it can be fairly said that the late 1960s were a period when the role of railways was being reconsidered in the context of transport as a whole. The 1968 Act was not just about railways; it also had a focus on road transport including new licensing standards for lorries. New Testing and Plating Regulations imposed more exacting safety standards on road hauliers who saw them as detrimental to their business. Yet at the same time motorway construction was underway everywhere, including the M4 and M5, making road haulage much quicker than rail. Another project I was given was to assess the likely impact of these developments on the West of England Division’s freight business. Obviously the construction of the motorways was an adverse factor for railways but the new plating regulations worked in their favour. This was the first time I had been able to undertake a project that was both interesting and intellectually demanding. It involved visiting all kinds of freight customers from Mr Kiplings Cakes to Bowyers Sausages. The report did influence BR’s approach to road competition. The point to register though is that railway management was alive to commercial forces and concerned to react to them.

In another project I recommended that spare engineering components for the Bath Road locomotive maintenance depot at Bristol could be more efficiently delivered by road and the traditional practice of sending them by rail was cancelled. This was further evidence of an open minded approach to management and a willingness to eliminate inefficiency.

In 1970 the West of England Division initiated the railway’s first attempt at what became known as market pricing, pitching fares according to demand and competition. I was involved in reviewing the competitive context for railway fares and the outcome was that these moved away from being simply mileage based. Financial and competitive pressures encouraged a more innovative approach to generating revenue, at the same time starting to move BR towards being a more commercial, market orientated business. Since then market pricing has spread across the whole rail network. Although today this is seen by critics as unnecessarily complex (and perhaps it is), it does go some way to explaining why the railway has been able to boost passenger numbers. Many fares on offer are now much cheaper than might otherwise be the case.

The railway then was in transition and doing much to face up to its challenges through a combination of cost and marketing initiatives. I consider myself fortunate to have been exposed to these issues and it speaks well of BR that it was prepared to set challenging projects to young graduates that placed a great deal of confidence in their ability to tackle them and which were clearly trying to address the financial and commercial realities of the time in innovative ways. The breadth and depth of training given at that time was of an order that provided a comprehensive appreciation of the railway as a total system, a perspective which in the years after privatisation became so diminished that it detracted from the overall efficient functioning of the industry. It still does. Given the fragmented industry that was established by the Railways Act 1993 an overall rail industry training scheme would have been worth its weight in gold. Sadly a lack of perceived demand (in itself a poor reflection of the value system then in play) meant that it didn’t happen.

Safety was another aspect of railways that was imbued in the management culture from the very start and which featured strongly in training programmes. It was re-enforced on me not just by classes and examinations but also by the experience of two serious train accidents that occurred whilst I was in the West of England. The first of these was between Bristol and Gloucester on 8th March 1969 when part of a freight train (the 0750 from Washwood Heath to Stoke Gifford) derailed at Ashchurch travelling at excessive speed and ploughed into the 1040 Bristol-Newcastle express, killing two passengers and injuring another 30. I attended the public inquiry in Cheltenham. Such inquiries always started with a minute’s silence to remember the accident victims, something that brought home in a very poignant way the reality of the risks inherent in railway operations. The second inquiry followed an accident that had occurred before I joined the railways, on 13th June 1967. In this case a passenger train derailment was caused by the buckling in heat of a continuously welded rail at Somerton on the main Berks and Hants line near Taunton. Continuous welding of railway tracks was a relatively new innovation and replaced the age old practice of expansion joints between rails. It was decided that as management trainees we would benefit from attendance at the public inquiry which was held at Ilminster, Somerset. I felt privileged to be exposed to such an experience at a very early stage in my career. Following a tragic accident at Cowden (Kent) in which people were killed much later in my career when I was Managing Director of Network South East, I experienced myself the stress of being the principal BR witness at a public inquiry.

For someone who as an undergraduate less than two years earlier had been oblivious to their complexities these experiences and exposures were invaluable means of acquiring an early appreciation of the railways as a system. The interaction of the various component parts was clear. The methods and processes applied to make them work together would become central management themes during the whole of my railway career. They remain so today.

In 1970 I received my first management appointments, seen then as an extension of training and designed to induce practical experience of the railway and provide a test bed to develop management skills. Initially I found myself at Slough. My posting as Assistant Area Manager (Commercial) meant that I was nominally in charge of all commercial activities in this fairly small area. I say nominally because my experience was very limited. The idea was that I should learn. I knew Slough well as I had taken my A Levels at its Grammar School five years earlier. The Area extended from West Drayton to Maidenhead and included a freight branch to Colnbrook (more recently canvassed as a possible link to Heathrow Airport) and the intermediate stations of Iver, Langley, Burnham, Taplow and Maidenhead where there was a branch line to Marlow via Bourne End. Slough, the biggest station, also had a branch line connection, to Windsor & Eton Central.

At the time I was too busily occupied in the daily routines to reflect much on whether or not the way things were organised made sense. The form of organisation remained geographical, essentially covering a discrete section of railway controlled from a single signal box at Slough. In those days, most BR Areas were established on a similar basis – fundamentally a geography that coincided with railway operations in a defined signalling control area. Everything that happened in the Area was prioritised operationally. Commercial activity was of secondary importance. There was no marketing role and no focus on any individual commercial sector. Mine was essentially a customer service role and extended to all businesses though the principal focus was on the passenger services operating through the Area – commuter trains to Paddington with occasional long distance expresses serving the towns and cities of the West Country, the Cotswolds and South Wales.

There was also significant freight activity in the Area which included a Ford van factory at Langley, a goods depot at Slough and a Fife’s banana warehouse at Taplow. These activities had little in common. The Ford’s traffic was distributed by transporter train on a daily basis, bananas arrived in individual van loads having started their UK journey at Southampton Docks and which on arrival required shunting into a small private siding for transfer to a local road distribution system. Whilst the Ford traffic was handled in a patently modern and efficient way, the banana operation reflected the vestiges of an inefficient and costly system of distribution entailing the retention of marshalling yards where whole trainloads were broken down for onward distribution in individual wagons, often requiring the deployment of under-employed but expensive locomotives.

Infrastructure and fleet maintenance were not part of the Area Manager’s responsibilities, sustaining a separation of the railway’s essential operating elements that was to continue for another 20 years. The managements responsible for the various functions appeared to have no formal meetings and it often seemed that they were working to separate agendas. Although the railway was still production rather than commercially driven, there was a further separation between the production functions themselves that was additionally inefficient. This was not what I would call a vertically integrated railway, even though it was all part and parcel of a single BR entity.

Nevertheless this was a period in which several marketing and commercial initiatives were beginning to take place, mostly initiated by the British Railways Board’s (BRB) central passenger marketing directorate, several of whom were recruited for their private sector expertise. Amongst the initiatives were the development of fares such as the Britrail Pass to attract foreign tourists and the launch of Golden Rail Holidays. I was for a short while seconded to help develop the pricing structures for both of these products. Golden Rail holidays were to become very popular and my job was to calculate the discounted rail element of the total price to be negotiated with a tour operator (Sidney De Haan), an entrepreneur based at Folkestone where he had recently established Saga, a company promoting holidays for senior citizens. This company was to develop into one of the largest in Britain and made Sidney and his son Roger multi-millionaires. The scheme worked very well for many years, generating substantial additional passenger revenues for BR.

I was soon sent down the line to Didcot as Assistant Manager in another Area that was responsible for multiple operational and commercial activities. During this period I undertook the decimalisation training of all the staff that needed to understand the new currency system when the country switched from pounds, shillings and pence. There were commuter stations at Didcot and in the Thames Valley at Pangbourne, Goring & Streatley, Cholsey & Moulsford, Appleford, Culham and Radley. There was a short freight line from Cholsey to Wallingford with a one train a day operation, and a large marshalling yard at Didcot which came into its own at Christmas as a redistribution point for parcels and mail vans destined for depots all over the country. Didcot was also home to a coal fired power station that received several merry-go-round train loads of coal from northern pits each day. Consequently it was a significant operations centre for several activities and special in the sense that it boasted a busy and complicated set of railway junctions connecting the Great Western Main Line on either side of Didcot station to Oxford, the central marshalling yards, and the power station. The points would sometimes fail and my first experience of having to hand crank and screw padlock points was at Foxall Junction. A detail too far? Not really because these multiple experiences offered valuable insights into many different aspects of railway operations and enabled me to understand more than I would otherwise have got to know if I had been working with a much narrower focus.

In 1970 I started a new job in the Western Region Chief Passenger Manager’s Office at Paddington. The Chief was Geoffrey Huskisson, a remote and haughty man descended from a Nineteenth Century politician, William Huskisson, the President of the Board of Trade who was killed by Stephenson’s Rocket at the Rainhill Speed Trials in 1830. My job involved planning the timetable from a commercial as opposed to operational point of view in an organisation that had been set up to recognise that the traditional operating department control of the timetable did not necessarily reflect market or customer requirements. In retrospect this can be seen as an important evolutionary development in which the railway started to move away from its traditional production led culture towards one which within a few years was to become commercially driven. A major point of interest was the responsibility we had for planning the introduction of the very first High Speed Train (HST) sets in Britain, later to be known as the InterCity 125. These were allocated to the Western Region because of the capability of the infrastructure built by Brunel, initially on the broad gauge which had required a track layout that minimised curves. The fact that as I write this book these same trains are still operating is a testimony to BR’s innovation half a century ago. A number of them have even been refurbished recently to provide a brand new InterCity service in Scotland, a firm reminder of the longevity of railway assets.

Three years into my railway career the dynamics of management were increasingly focused on commercial opportunities as much as they were in handling the impact on the railway’s infrastructure and economics of the declining freight and parcels traffics that were being exposed to more and more road competition. Meanwhile passenger volumes were up about 10% compared with 1968, although market share overall fell to 8% as car ownership grew at a faster rate.

In 1971 I was appointed Assistant Station Manager (Commercial) at London’s Liverpool Street station, one of the country’s busiest. There I became increasingly aware of some of the important human factors that were at play in running the railway. Sadly some of these reflected every bit as badly on management as they did on the trade unions. The manager in overall charge of commercial activities on what is known today as Greater Anglia kept ‘gentleman’s hours’ which seemed to be 10 to 4 each day with two hours for lunch. He saw himself as something in the City, a member of one of the City of London Livery Companies which in reality meant that each day he spent a long and liquid lunch at the Great Eastern Hotel with his cronies probably under the self-deception that he was furthering the interests of the railway. Meanwhile the operations function was beset with a similar drinking culture, a serious problem amongst all manner of management and staff on the railways at this time. One senior manager was notorious for his heavy drinking. Someone told me that he was poured into his car by his chauffeur every night. The same man was responsible for implementing important changes to driver management following a serious accident that occurred when an excursion train returning to London from the Kent coast was derailed because the train took a curve in the line at excessive speed 2. The driver had been intoxicated.

In the early 1970s there was deep suspicion and antipathy between the management and unions which I experienced at first hand. BR had recently decided to introduce a new devolved form of management known as the Field Re-organisation. The railway was to be divided into a number of new, empowered, locally-accountable entities (in this case the whole of East Anglia) in which a far more integrated approach would apply to the co-ordination of all its activities. One aspect involved the transfer of driver management to the Area Managers and away from the train depots where it had lain alongside responsibility for train maintenance since the days of steam. Using the arcane practices of the Negotiation and Consultation Machinery, the drivers’ union, ASLEF, had successfully delayed implementation and in fact eventually thwarted the reorganisation, though at Area Management level